Recent reviews by Calgor

I don't feel this DLC is all that great and for me wasn't worth the price tag.

Unlanded gameplay for all the hype and expectations everyone had for it tends to see you facing a lot of the same random travel events you used to find when your character was travelling normally. When it's an occasional thing for a landed ruler it's fine but when you're unlanded facing these same decisions going to contracts and moving your camp elsewhere it gets boring very quickly. It just lacks long term substance. I can't see myself wanting to stay unlanded for anything more than a few generations before I've seen and done everything I care to experience with it and use it as a brief intermission between losing one title and regaining it later and that's it.

The new Administrative Government style could really do with some tweaks. It seems far too easy to take and maintain power and seems to lack the backstabbing behaviour expected from such a position. With meanwhile the estates and noble housing mechanics currently leading to an endless bloat of non-entity governors and their non-entity houses somehow being of relevance hundreds of years later.

The Byzantine flavour is nice, it all looks flash so I can't critique that too much.

This is a story pack and while it's all well and good getting to see some of these events of the X-Universe history, some of the missions thrown at you are just awful.

They are tedious, badly thought out wave defences or doing races and some of the most dismal content I've come across. Thank goodness you only need to scrape through some of these with a lower rating to progress, unlock the things for the open universe and get on with completing this abysmal DLC as quickly as possible. If it wasn't for wanting to have some of those ships normally, I'd be seriously considering seeking a refund.

I can assure you once I've unlocked everything of relevance for the main universe I'll never be touching the timelines story as long as I live.

For a £5 content pack, this is reasonably priced. The new university mechanics are pretty hefty in their in-game gold costs but the perks of a high level education trait are significant.

The additional content for hostages is nice, if you choose to engage with them. I personally don't all that often but the times I have it's added some nice new stuff to help set up ties and friendship hooks to help your ruler or your heir.

And some of the new events for children or playing as a child ruler have been really good, fantastic at giving a little more interaction to help shape the future adult ruler with the option to try and shift their traits, extra skill points, potential free lifestyle perk with some events...

So pinch of salt here since theres a lot of EG1/2 comparison...

Yes, minions are (initially) useless and fall over even to a stiff breeze, walk past people that you want someone to deal with and generally be a bit dumb but that's to be expected and no different to how they behaved in the first game. That was also the era there were even fewer tools to track agents as well as fewer minions to deal with everything, hell they were even worse in EG1! Even later on they don't get that much better but they are at least competent. Some of the time. But that's vaguely reminiscent of your typical spy/super villain conflicts from films, your good guy heroes and agents always manage to dispatch the minions with ease. It's the henchmen that you really have to watch out for, those are the figures you always see in the films as being the real challenges. Super Agents, they will always wreck your day. If you pay attention to the world map you'll usually never need to worry about them paying a visit until you want them to or trigger them. This isn't like EG1 where they just show up unannounced at a certain heat level and retire half your staff pool and even if they do, the right henchmen and agents in place will send them on their way with only a few casualties.

The important lesson to learn is to prioritise research, get ahead of the research curve before ramping up the story otherwise it will bite you on the backside later. The game doesn't really advise you of that and you somewhat have to learn it by trial and error, learning the hard way that you don't quite have enough vitality or traps to keep everyone at bay. The initial tutorial of how to play at all though is a lot of hand holding which again isn't a bad thing if you are coming into this never playing anything of the genre.

The graphics are a little bit cartooney but it's not a bad thing. It sort of adds to the parody nature of EG2 for what it is, a comedic endeavour about villainy full of action film references and bad puns, not a playthrough about gritty evilness. And that's all part of the setup. It's missing some of the quirky humour and dialog in places that the last game featured that made it amusing but there's only so many times you can hear the radio lines "The weather in the Sahara is the same as usual, drier than a cream cracker on a sunbed" (or whatever it was) before you got sick of the radio alerts, but it's got some additional sources to raise the odd chuckle.

It is a bit slow and grindy in places but no different to the last one. You spend ages of quiet, swatting or diverting the odd investigator away and trickling money away from locations on the world stage to plan and build up. Update the lair, then get screwed over when agents perhaps take some of your staff down because they snuck in and you spend a ton of money fixing and updating and the cycle continues. This is nothing new for EG and it isn't a bad mechanic if you go into the game expecting that. If you expect to be finishing a campaign in a day and starting something new (which is going to be difficult unless there's a Spiffing Brit level of exploit in here as yet unreleased), probably not happening.

The UI is still a bit clunky in places, especially when it came to building or moving things around, which I always found temperamental but I can live with it, and it's improved from the first game some considerable measure whatever happens.

Overall it is a good foundation of a game which I expect will be further refined and updated with additional patches and content and I feel it'll be worth sticking with it.

I want to love this game, I really really do. The theme of it is great. The lore of this, fantastic but my god it's buggy as hell on release and so flaky. The middle ground settings are fine until the game has to do some work for a few seconds and by the looks of the low number of missions it's going to struggle with some replayability if it doesn't get something new pretty quick.

I really want to give it a good review but I just can't in good conscience. To do so would be to speak a falsehood of the God Emperor.

First few words would be what the hell have you done to what is otherwise an exceptional RTS?!

The main campaign is buggy, uncoordinated, terribly imbalanced even on lower difficulty. The plot of it is illogical, doesn't seem to link together in any feasible way, skips bits in places. Most of the units are a reskin of existing ones with the same descriptives and even the same image in some cases so nothing seems actually new for this. Basically what you're paying for is something which hasn't been playtested, hasn't been quality checked at all and just looks like a low budget modders compendium. Actually I withdraw that, Steam Workshop mods have quality, this does not.

Utterly atrocious and I would strongly advise anyone even thinking of this DLC to not waste their money on it at all. I've seen better content on the Steam Workshop for this which is genuinely worth the £7 cost of this. Frankly though I wouldn't waste 7 pence on this until it gets a major kick up the arse to bring itself into gear...what little there is to bring into gear mind.

Brilliant!